


Riding Shotgun to The Edge of The World

by SC182



Category: Fast Five (2011), Fast and the Furious Series, Smallville
Genre: Implied Character Death, M/M, Pre-Slash, Season 3 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 02:41:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SC182/pseuds/SC182
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A car ride, illusions, and things left unsaid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Riding Shotgun to The Edge of The World

Dom kicks up the throttle in the Challenger and drives-- fast and as far as he can get, hoping somehow to reach the edge of the world. He cuts across the continent and rides the voluptuous curves that transition from arid and low to sinuous chains of mountains with enough green to almost choke him up in longing for the smog of the city.  
  
His roads run out somewhere farther north, where the temperature is once again hot and tropical, so muggy that he sticks to the leather of the highback bucket seat. There’s a beach below the high reedy dunes where he rolls Challenger to a tentative stop. It’s full of sea oats and quilted patches of grass and rock, barely disturbed by the waves yawning against startling white sand. It’s the Pacific calling him home after years running to all corners and directions opposite of his past.  
  
Dom’s never cared for the beach, but ultimately ended up there for beer, girls and parties circling towering bonfires—each tasting a little like freedom. Without a real course or destination, he ends up here, on a beach, where it’s just him, the twin sea and sky, and his car.  
  
He still feels trapped.  
  
Being wrong about the state of the beach’s emptiness gives him a slight start. Outside the car, he leans against the grill, taking him the sun, allowing the wind to roll over him, ruffle him as the only other body on the beach turns his way. They lock eyes across the distance, the stranger no more than a dot at the other end. Dom wonders if he’s just imagining the pull, the sudden magnetic attraction lodged in the center of his chest after their eyes meet; he’s not wrong.  
  
The boy—Clark—ends up in the passenger seat. By some matter of happenstance, Clark turns out to be American, far from home, and far younger than he seems. The fact that he’s running is blazed across his chest like some super emblem. Dom offers Clark a ride, which Clark accepts, and they turn around, heading back to the main road without the spray of rocks and a cloud of burnt rubber behind them.  
  
As the wall of blue grows smaller in the rear-view mirror, Dom realizes he hasn’t asked where Clark’s headed, nor has Clark offered up a place to be. So they don’t rush and just drive because they have all the time in the world.  
  


* * *

  
  
Clark doesn’t talk a lot, so everything Dom learns is through causal observation. Outside of Bogota, he takes a mental tally of who his traveling companion seems to be. Builds a mental composite and compares and contrasts it with who he wants it to be. Reeling the list off in his head as they pass start the next mile simply passes the time for Dom.  
  
His list:  
1.Clark is a boy scout. _Not literally._  
  
2.Despite being big as hell, Clark can make himself disappear, subverting physics and nature to reduce himself to a shell of his intimidating figure.  
  
3.He’s not what he seems.  
  
Dom doesn’t look for trouble, sometimes it heads his way and he meets it head on like a heat-seeking missile with a radioactive core, full of fire and twisted up feelings of coiled frustration. When Dom asks Clark about the sudden flash-fire and crumbled cement left behind after the bar fight turned small scale riot near Caracas, Clark turns a funny shade of queasy green and looks so guilty that Dom regrets asking. He just buys the kid a tray of yucca fries and a soda and calls it a day.  
  
4.Clark wears his heart on his sleeve, and from the look of things, it’s been pulverized to dust. Dom knows the feeling and gets a fresh taste of it each time he catches a flash of black curls instead of blond over golden skin. A small voice intones with a lazy surfer drawl that the ghost in his periphery is _just not right_.  
  


* * *

  
  
Karma is a bitch. Or maybe it’s the universe. Or the law of averages. That’s how they get _here_ in this dingy roadside bungalow in another seaside town. They’re still together for a reason: the reason being that each is the other’s not-quite right yin to the other’s fractured yang.  
  
The air is hot despite the hours of heavy nighttime blanketing the land in darkness and stuffy with just the faintest traces of saltwater and late summer blossoms from flowers impossible to pronounce. They move over the faded mosaic of the bedspread, its decipherable pattern having bled over countless washes. There’s no light while they do this, not that he believes Clark needs one; just another one of those things Dom’s figured out.  
  
On his back, Clark lies willing, vocally yielding with legs spread open and lips following Dom’s every move. It feels like Clark’s been idling until now, stalled in neutral waiting for this. Waiting for someone to pick up the reins to take control and never let him go. And so, Dom wonders who this mysterious bad boy is that he’s playing doppelganger to.  
  
Clark’s hands are broad and thick fingered, far smoother than a farm boy’s hands have a right to be. Dom barely suppresses a shiver as those deceptively strong hands glide over his scalp, trailing worshiping fingers over the bald contours. Breath hitching now while Clark palms the back of his skull and cradles his head with infinite care. Just another sign that this is all wrong.  
  
Dom reaches up, carefully detaching Clark’s hands from his head as he knows what those hands are capable of, and presses Clark’s arms down onto the bed. He rolls his hips forward--hard and deliberately over Clark’s straining hard on, drawing a gasp from Clark’s mouth, where the lips are far too plush to smirk so carelessly or draw Dom in with the slightest quirk the way instinct demands. The only thing right about them is how pink they are, how they’re made to suck cock and lie easier than they should.  
  
Each kiss tastes nothing like beer and lime cresting over a low trace of ever-present sea salt. Instead, Dom finds himself savoring the spark and pop of sugar and the crispness of ozone mixed with sunshine in Clark’s mouth. It’s too pure and clashes with his memory. Clark’s skin is the right color—just the perfect shade of healthy white boy gold. If Dom lies to himself by embracing the small graces offered by the cover of dark, then he can fool himself into believing that fickle blue-green eyes are unrepentantly cosmic blue, darkening to pure black adrenaline blown pupils because Dom is setting a pace so tortuous, only the man under him is capable of keeping up and grows more addicted with each ticked off second.  
  
But the illusion always breaks. The devil in the details only wants his proper dues, because shoulders that are too broad, too heavily muscled, and hair perfectly sweat curled but too dark added with legs longer than necessary are small catalysts, together as devastating as an earthquake, which force him to accept the truth.  
  
Clark tries to hold onto the fantasy. His hand gravitates from Dom’s head to his hips,latching on like motion rotating through the joints is the only thing keeping him from flying off the edge. And each kiss, Clark takes, steals it, draws breath from Dom with the determination to store each one to memory, knowing undoubtedly that each could be a definite last. Dom hates thinking of Clark as a kid; the thought gives his stomach a sick roil, but Clark’s kisses, the caress of his lips reveal too much—speak of life and death—when this is only supposed to be fucking. A little more life experience, extra tread on his tires, will teach him that.  
  
Dom knows better.  
  
Despite Clark’s past and being summing up to an inscrutable knot of mysteries untold, he reveals too much here, under Dom’s hands. Once he’s wrangled over to his stomach, Dom kisses his neck, draws the tip of his nose over each bump along the slope of his spine and laves a trail down the long curving line. The ass that waits at the end, covered in a soft dusting of peach fuzz, is perfect—beautiful like the rest of Clark—reminding Dom that the universe has a sick sense of humor. One beautiful man with perfect features can’t be substituted for another (the same goes for bald bad boys with chips on their shoulders the size of Texas that drive too fast) because people aren’t puzzle pieces and real life doesn’t work like that.  
  
Inside, Clark is just to the left of scalding and tight, so freaking tight he’s almost vice-like. They move together by riding the pace Dom has set; Clark’s back bows under Dom’s chest while Dom’s muscles strain to hold him up, though he knows Clark can bear his weight with some facility. So he concentrates on stirring his hips, forcing Clark to meet him stroke for stroke before reaching around to jerk Clark to completion.  
  
Keeping his head low helps him to focus, especially when Clark’s mouth—already too pink and too swollen—begins to spill sounds that further distort the moment like fine cracks in fresh concrete. For every groaning “ooohh”, there should be breathy “aahh” that still remains stubborn, refusing to come apart for Dom, instead grasping the opportunity to challenge him and to force him to go deeper and harder.  
  
And the three letter name moaned first in a low timbre rising gradually to an airy soft pitch as Dom’s hand outpaces his thrusts, milking Clark’s cock until he slides into a boneless heap, sweaty heap, is not Lex.  
  
“Dom,” his mind substitutes, in a perfect mockery of Brian’s worn out post-sex rasp.  
  
For a second, he can believe it’s really Brian. Almost.  
  
Then he comes, hard, like a runaway train crashing into the side of a mountain. The explosion from one last corkscrew pivot of his hips and spine renders him into a blown apart mess: void of peace and destroyed by the inability to forget.  
  
Rolling off makes his tired muscles more tired. He drops down to the bed beside Clark and what remains of the illusion dissipates, forcing him into an unwanted moment of lust-drunk sobriety. Clark looks satisfied, enough to stroke Dom’s pride, maybe happy even, though the unspoken “this should have been someone else” clouds his face. Because Clark’s poker face is for shit. Dom feels the same way about knowing and feeling like he should be with someone else, thinks the same thing, just hides it better.  
  
They know that what they’re doing is only filling in gaps. This is not a _forever_ type of thing. Forever starts as a series of quarter mile stretches in LA, turning into winding roads with names too clunky for his lazy Spanish, but perfect for Brian’s, and ends scattered across Brazil. He can only imagine where Clark’s forever is: probably somewhere wholesome like Iowa, Oklahoma, or Kansas, but just as rough-hewn and broken down as Dom’s at the end.  
  
Since forever is out of reach, they only have certain unchangeable truths to build their mental sandcastles of lies and permanently unfulfilled wishes on. Dom isn’t Lex and Clark isn’t Brian.  
  
This isn’t how the future is supposed to play out, but it’s all they’ve got. They’ll turn away from each other tonight; slip off to dream the dreams of many nights gone by when the world had been right and illusions were another name for magic tricks.  
  
Tomorrow or the next day, they’ll leave, quit lingering in another town that’s barely a dot on the map, and get back on the road. In the car, the low purr of the Challenger will fill the empty spaces absent of conversation while Dom and Clark replay memories and insert thousands of things unsaid to their intended partners in forever.  
  
Dom and Clark each have their secrets. One day, they may have a conversation about all the ghosts riding with them. Until then, this is simply a drive to the edge of the world. When they find it, then maybe they’ll talk.


End file.
